


Heart of the GNACHO

by Charles_Rockafellor



Series: Tell me more about this Earth-thing [2]
Category: Heart of the comet (David Brin and Gregory Benford | 1986)
Genre: Gemeinschaft, General Relativity, Great Filter, Lobachе́vskiy-Bolyai-Gauss, Other, Science Fiction, Slice of Life, Tau overunity, inverse Lorentz transform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:22:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27103411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charles_Rockafellor/pseuds/Charles_Rockafellor
Summary: “Heart of the Comet” (Brin and Benford, 1986) looks at how different ecological systems could affect one another, long term, and some of the (good and bad) consequences and cautions.  “Heart of the GNACHO” looks at the retrospective of trying to find alien life forms when artificial indicators look like natural background.  This story isn't set in the fandom, instead only taking a page from its premise.𝑫𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝑳𝒊𝒌𝒆, 𝑺𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒆, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑺𝒖𝒃𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒊𝒃𝒆! ❤️
Series: Tell me more about this Earth-thing [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1975186
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: Sci-fi





	Heart of the GNACHO

**Author's Note:**

> This single-chapter short story is a sequel to “The Space Orcs are coming, hooray, hooray”, of the **_series_** “[Tell me more about this Earth-thing](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1975186)”. There's also a third (multi-chapter) story (“When in Rome”) in the series, which explores more of Billie's intergalactic community, zer relationship with Avery, and the changing dynamic as Billie's friend raʔûR (a Cat-girl) comes to visit (it feels to me as if it has some of the chaos of “Tenchi Muyo”).
> 
> “Heart of the GNACHO” is also the fork to _another_ series, being the first story in the two-part [Out of time](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1995391) series (somewhat of a crack-fic, inspired by Dr. Who and Deadpool), in which the Time Lord-like being known as Cauchy discovers “The Screwed-up Letter”.
> 
> And for the search engine: “Kardashev”.

_**From the mémoires of Avery d'Arc, Space Orc** _

GNACHOs: Gravitationally Negative Anomalous Compact Halo Objects.

That's what we called them at first.

They were just a hypothetical curiosity, until one of our deep space probes actually spotted something that matched the parameters. Then all bets were off and there was an avalanche of scientific papers. Most were wild guesses, some resurrecting long-discarded Kaluza-Klein models and other such oddities. Some managed to get parts of it right. Nobody expected them to be inhabited artificial bodies.

Stellar systems in general and planetary bodies in particular – especially those with conditions similar to one's home planet – had long been assumed to be the logically preferred habitat of any developing species. Some science fiction had posited viral lifeforms in Oort clouds and nebulae, some even going so far as to imagine life evolving within stars (or as stars) or on their surfaces or in their atmospheres, some even imagining such things going on at the crust of neutron stars and even within the accretion discs of black holes.

Turned out they were all wrong.

Not entirely wrong in the premise of life needing _someplace_ to come into existence in the first place, no, but wrong about where it might choose to live.

Gravity wells are expensive. They bring in a fair amount of material over time, but at high speeds. This results in continuous bombardment, debris everywhere, and an uphill climb to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbors.

Explains why we never found no Dyson spheres, I guess, though Billie (my alien girlfriend, for those who don't know) insists that those are inherently unstable and ultimately just silly. So who said silly's a bad thing? C'mon, man – it'd be _**cool**_!

It's all in the psychology: only primitive hubris and lunatic species argue for the low-lying fruit of active galaxies and their supermassive black hole cores, brimming over with novae and supernovae on a monthly basis. Oh sure, it's fine if you shrug off lions, and tigers, and bears – but what if you don't hunt anything more dangerous than a head of lettuce? If your home world offered no greater threat than the philosophical shock of sunrise?

Living interstellar – or intergalactic, even better – keeps you far from any little issues that might come up. You want to go where the action is? The sprawling, bustling cosmic megalopoli? You go to the cosmic voids _between superclusters_. You live in some filthy, dangerous wild-land of galactic mass? You're risking your life every second you're there, and probably have more parochial taste than Plato's cave-dwellers.

Just to be on the safe side, they cocooned themselves within hills of gravitational repulsion, minimizing issues both with the Unruh effect and accelerated masses from any direction. Objects and waves of energy almost literally go out of their way to avoid you, whereas a gravitational well pretty much paints a target on your back. It also has the relativistic effect of watching the universe around you proceed at a slower pace than normal, kinda like watching something in a lower orbit near an event horizon: your own time marches along at a brisk pace **1** when compared to relatively flat spacetime, permitting you the luxury of studying and adjusting for any outside contingencies well in advance of their arrival.

Combine that with the fact that they could turn stuff into relatively short-lived WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, one kind of “dark matter”) 'til it was far enough away again not to be a problem, and something like that for energy (I asked Billie if she meant that they turned radiation into _dark energy_ , and she went on this really sweet but long-winded explanation that basically added up to “ _No, and here's why..._ ”). OK, so maybe not – but don't tell me they don't have some kinda inside track on _phantom energy_ , at least in some weird way local to themselves.

For centuries, we had watched the stars, sometimes picking up elusive hints of signals, but never localizing them, never drawing a plausible parallax, never spotting conclusive signatures of negative entropic processes or statistically significant radio emissions at any frequency.

We conjectured apes and angels – life out there being either insufficiently advanced to make such impacts, or so far advanced as to have become invisible to our analyses; we considered the Great Filter, killing species by various mechanisms. We came close with the Dark Forest scenario, but for the wrong reasons. They were hidden, but they weren't in hiding, or at least not from anyone else, just the deadly conditions that massive bodies engendered.

“ _Why didn't we at least hear 'em squawking?_ ” you ask?

We weren't listening. Simple as that.

It was right there, and we heard it all, but we didn't hear that there was any conversatin' bein' had. It was just so much random noise to us, like a large crowd's many conversations sounding like a flock of geese.

Any sufficiently advanced encoding and compression is indistinguishable from noise.

Once we finally realized where they were, thanks to Billie, it wasn't long before we at last established communications. It helped that she'd also shared the basics of her computer – that's about as accurate as calling it an abacus, since it works with a grain of sand frozen in time (she says it ain't, it's just sitting at a specific Planck moment and accessed with retrocausal transactional waves, but that sounds close enough to frozen time for me), giving it something like an exabyte or zetabyte of storage and processing (again, sorta: it takes time for it to do its job, but the answer's already there before you ask, and there's this weird feedback loop where you get the exact answer you want, because if you didn't, then you'd refine your question, and then that next answer replaces the first one... I dunno, somehow you end up asking a million questions at once, but never get around to asking any one of 'em in the first place) with all of the nucleons and electrons just sitting there and biding their time. Funny thing is how she wishes she had a collapsed membrane computer **2** instead; I'm not real sure about the details, but I gather that it's a black hole about the same size (maybe a millimeter in radius), and somehow that means it can do a _lot_ more with its total entropy (makes sense, I guess: it'd have about ten to the twenty-third or twenty-fourth kilograms in it, and that's a whole lot of grains of sand) – _don't tell her this, but I'm plannin' on getting her one for our anniversary_.

Anyway, the natives were friendly. They _all_ were.

That made us a little nervous for a good while to come.

Eventually we figured out why.

They had no need of further resources, and we were technologically about as much of a threat to them as some horseshoe crabs in a Pacific atoll might be to us – and that was just the ones who were still at stages where interaction was even meaningfully possible for us. Others had already gone on to embedding themselves into M-space, sort of like uploading themselves as far as we could understand, and who knew (or could even guess at) what those before them might have gone on to by now. The explanation wasn't deflecting none, just difficult to interpret.

There were some species here and there who were more or less on our level, of course, it's just that nobody stayed there for very long once they'd dialed into the cosmic chat rooms.

That's where we came in.

The species at our level are less adapted to the universe. Or maybe we're over-adapted to Earth. Either way, we turned out to be like armored tigers in a landscaped lawn of hothouse flowers. They'll panic at a gentle breeze while we go swimming in hurricane tides and bask in radiation because it _feels nice_.

They have their issues at times, but they're alright. Mostly.

Some of them are obnoxious, but there's plenty of real estate for anyone who cares to bother.

All of that's yesterday's news though.

The real fun is just beginning, now that we can go to new places, poke things with sticks, and pet all kinds of small furry creatures!

Speaking of which, I'm glad Billie's ship has plenty of space. The tribbles are fixed, so that's no problem, but then there's Ryo-Ohki the cabbit, and the stellar-fish tank, the gemstone leaf-slug, Bob and Madge the skutters (semi-sentient mechanical life forms we saved from a derelict ship; they're more like mascots than pets), another tank with a pygmy jawanda **3** (sort of ephemeral gossamer sheets that live way out in the galactic rim and soak up interstellar dust and stray light), some comet lobsters **4** with their little sand castle and tunnels underneath, the new puppy **5** , and a few others...

Well, Billie's waiting for me. We have a candlelight dinner planned and a little “private time” together. And boy, lemme tell you: her food-o-matic **6** can make things from _thousands_ of worlds' cuisines, and even do a fair job with just descriptions (she also says that we should be able to get a good work-up from preserved genetic samples, and there are a few extinct species I wanna try); tonight is coquito, salmon and avocado involtini, some nice fat venison sirloins done rare in white wine and rendered lard, lime-drenched seared scallops with onions sautéed in a light syrup of brown sugar and paprika, wild rice with pecans, artichokes, chopped duck, and chorizo, and topping it all off with dessert is mint ice cream (she kinda caught a hankering for that particular “ _sweet deathworld torture-poison_ ” as she puts it, so it comes up a lot) over flan with mango flambé and vanilla fudge ice cream on the side. As good as that food-o-matic is (and believe me: it can take the worst ingredients and recipe and spit out an amazing dish), I can't wait to upload Earth's complete repertoire into it! Then there's this all-female Cat-girl species that she caught me eyeballing the other day – _I wasn't thinkin' on them none, I swear_ – and she kind of decided to surprise me today with her little body-snatcher routine; turns out one of her friends, raʔûR (that's a trill at the start and a uvular at the end – you pick this up around a lot of weird alien lingoes), is a Cat-girl.

After that, we're looking ahead to this nice little vacation spot to explore. A bit of a wild world with miles-high mossy plateaus and hot springs that interconnect through a series of natural bridges over deep canyons filled with mist and some kind of ghostly flying carpet critters made of quasiparticles blipping in and out of existence. Should be a real kick. I don't know why nobody else ever wants to go there. Crazy aliens.

Signing off for now,

– _**Avery**_

**O ~~~ O**

**Author's Note:**

> **1** Time dilation: Taking the standard E = mc2 * (1 - (v2/c2))-1/2 (cf.: time dilation, Doppler shift, Lorentz transform, Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction) and applying it to a GNACHO (cf.: exotic matter, negative energy density [esp. Casimir], negative matter [esp. Robert L. Forward, Kip S. Thorne] – not to be confused with [CP-reversed] antimatter) gives the usual gamma factor with its sign reversed. Here, although the living facilities are presumably massive, the overall field produced around them (possibly re-vectored, or induced via some Higgs-damping field) total out in the negative (negative Gaussian: geometrically hyperbolic). A stronger negative curvature yields a greater positive slope (i.e.: gravitationally uphill, increasingly) as one attempts to approach the bodies, and a concomitant increase to gamma.
> 
> **NB:** the local negative curvature does not confer a tachyonic field, which rhymes with an imaginary (± sqrt -1) lead coefficient for the mass.
> 
> **2** Computers: Lacking better guidance than standard sci-fi and assuming some physical limitation to Moore's Law regarding any given computing medium (Banach-Tarski aside), I'm going to guess that the sand grain computer description might be an overall mid- to high-Type I technology (I.5-I.8?) on the several Kardashёv scales, with the black hole membrane amounting to a low- to mid-Type II (II.2-II.5?). Although I think that the type of tech involved in the sand grain approach is more interesting and sci-fi, the information capacity of the black hole approach is staggering by contrast.
> 
> Assume a ≈2 mm diameter grain of sand to weigh ≈20 mg (≈3*1020 “average” atoms; assume avg. of SiO2 ≈ 10 electrons + 20 nucleons); particle count puts it at around Sagan level O storage max. All else aside, the sheer difference in total mass is somewhere on the order of 3*1026. That brings us to ≈1045 units. Presumably the membrane mechanism can convert particles (stabilizing the whole as needed) and work with tinier units than electron masses (which even just working with electron masses would give almost a 2,000 fold increase in available resources per nucleon mass, so → 40,000 per nucleus). ≈1049 electron mass units, minimum (Sagan level AR). These numbers aren't meant to be solid, just ballpark. The tricky part is when considering low freq waves' phase angles as dt → 0; the low freq = low E :: low m hence more bits, but vanishing dt ∝ vanishing dθ. All of this could as easily be qubit, the same issue applies.
> 
> Billie's anniversary present will be insanely more powerful than what ze currently has (and what ze has right now is already insanely powerful by our standards).
> 
> For a more in-depth and extended Kardashёv scale, to include Traveller RPG Tech Levels, please see “[Powers and Principalities](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29371374)”.
> 
> **3** Jawanda: ST:TAS “Log Eight”, Foster's novelization (with expanded material) of the animated episode, so a bit secondary as far as canonicity (or second-and-a-half-ary, given ST:TAS having been canon, then de-canonized, then re-canonized).
> 
> **4** Comet lobsters: See Robert L. Forward's “Camelot 30K” (1993).
> 
> **5** Puppy: The “puppy”, left undescribed here, is halfway between the scaled hellhounds of Crematoria in “The chronicles of Riddick” (2004) and the quilled jackal of Not Furya in “Riddick” (2013).
> 
> **6** Food-o-matic: These don't come up very often. ST:TOS comes to mind (low- to mid-Type I), and HHGttG (all over the place, but maybe Type III-IV?) of course, but that's about it off the top of my head. Early 21c real-world Earth sits at ≈Type 0.7-1.1±, depending upon whom you ask. We have 3d printers, and have applied some limited capability to printing food, but certainly aren't yet down to consumer level molecular balance, much less tailored energy-to-mass microwave dinners.
> 
> Let's just say that it's maybe a minimum of ≈Type I.5± Kardashёv. Given the rest of Billie's tech, the food-o-matic might be quite a bit more advanced, but it could just as easily be a quaint technology that's sat at its original level pretty much as stably as our “modern” cookware and cutlery.


End file.
